Today Eclipse GlassFish 5.1 has been released, and unlike the modest increase in version number might suggest, this truly marks a major milestone. Not just for the GlassFish project itself, but for Java EE and moving Jakarta EE forward even more.

Logging is one of the key concepts for successfully running your applications. It tells you what your application and server is doing. And of course, logging is the first place you should look when things go wrong.

As of this month, there will no longer be any public JDK 8 releases. This means that security fixes won't be publicly accessible. A Payara support contract lets you take advantage of Payara's partnership with Azul, providing you with access to Zulu Enterprise. This means that you will have access to all future JDK 8 security fixes. Below are some common questions we receive regarding Zulu Enterprise and how it works with a Payara support contract.

As presumably well known by now, Java EE is in progress of being transferred to the Eclipse Foundation. A lot of work, partially behind the scenes, has been done to make his happen. This work included discussions between vendors and other interested individuals, the vetting of the code in the Java EE repo at GitHub, actually transferring the code from the Java EE repo to the Eclipse repo, and most recently the preparation of the transferred code to be buildable on Eclipse Foundation infrastructure and changing the Maven coordinates over from javax.* to jakarta.*

In November, my friend Milen Dyankov started it all by inviting me to come to Warsaw to give a talk at a local developer meetup (sponsored by Liferay, Milen's employer). After attending several big conferences during the year, coming to talk at a much smaller event sounded quite relaxing! Visiting Warsaw for the first time was also tempting so I agreed to attend.

Java EE 8 fully supports asynchronous handling of REST requests and responses, on both client and server side. This is useful to optimize throughput of an application or even when adopting reactive principles. MicroProfile type-safe REST client API also supports this concept to allow you to call REST services asynchronously with a much more straightforward way with plain Java interfaces.

Payara Server provides many metrics within JMX beans. The most interesting metrics are the statistics around pools for HTTP threads and JDBC Connection pooling.

On the other hand, Payara Server also implements the MicroProfile Metrics specification. The retrieval of useful metrics from the running instance in the areas of CPU, memory, Class loading, and other MicroProfile specifications (like Fault Tolerance), are possible through the implementation of the MicroProfile Metrics in Payara Server.